But YouTube’s community censorship guidelines are as clear as tar. Publishers who run afoul of them, are given “strikes” which supposedly expire after three months. The problem: YouTube’s censors can’t or won’t reveal what it is about an individual video that earned the publisher the black mark. Which makes it hard to avoid running afoul of the alleged standards again.

A couple of YouTube’s most popular gun content creators — the Military Arms Channel and Sootch00 — have recently been issued strikes by YouTube’s star chamber of community standards umpires. We emailed MAC’s Tim Harmsen for more information and he sent the following:

Yes, both myself and Sootch00 have been hit again. I’ve attached a screen shot of the warning we receive when we log into our accounts after a strike has been given. We must “acknowledge” the strike before we can use the site. I assume that means we’re admit wrongdoing in order to regain access to our channel. Crafty!

The video that was targeted this time was about a police trade-in Yugo SKS I bought on the surplus market. This video is no different in content than any of the other 714 videos I currently host on YouTube. If this innocuous video is in violation of their community guidelines, then all of my videos are. So it’s only a matter of time before they kick me completely off the site like they recently did with James Yeager.

Yeager’s offense? He posted a podcast of himself chatting with Ben Mookie. Yeah, pretty objectionable stuff right there.

Here’s the video I received a strike for, but this one is hosted on Vimeo who doesn’t seem to care what you upload.

Let me know what you think. Is that “objectionable”? Did I do or say something offensive? Did I break any laws? Did I cuss? Did I suggest people do something illegal with the rifle? Or was this an educational video about a classic military rifle?

Now, watch this next video on YouTube for a comparison. Ironically, this video, and countless others like it, aren’t considered “questionable” and YouTube claims it’s protected speech. Huh. Penises and condoms = freedom of expression and is creative expression. They even call it “educational”. I call it porn.

Click image above to view video. Warning: NSFW

If I post a video about a historic military rifle being discussed in detail and fired, it isn’t “educational” to the YouTube censors. It’s somehow “objectionable” and potentially dangerous content. No matter how many times I ask what part of my content is specifically objectionable, I get no answer.

I’ve had a total of three strikes given in the last few months, and I’ve successfully lobbied to have them removed. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t.

I’m also hearing they’re on the attack with other channels too. Through the grapevine I’m hearing that even knife channels are being hit now. I don’t watching those channels, but it might be worth looking into for a story.

You might want to look into the PragerU lawsuit. They’re suing on the grounds that YouTube protects and supports leftist viewpoints, but heavily censors and even punishes right leaning viewpoints when discussing the same subject. I think a lot of that suit applies to what’s happening in the firearms community.

comments

Well, yes, actually.
If they went after Ian on Forgotten Weapons, I’d get pretty ticked too but then again Full 30 hasn’t exactly taken off to replace YouTube yet… so… what’s the answer? The free market should be able to come up with a better alternative but so far, nothing. 🤠

The days of advertisers and getting money from views is over. Channels on youtube are now surviving thanks to Patreon, so there’s no reason that gun channels can’t move to Vimeo or Dailymotion or Pornhub.

It’s not rocket science.

Would be pretty fucking sad though that gun channels had to move to porn websites to not be censored. Gotta love how upside down the Progressives turn porn into art and guns into porn.

I am posting to Full30 and Vimeo. Vimeo charges to host, Full30 doesn’t. We can all move there, but it’s a matter of getting the firearms community to venture of YouTube for a little while to watch videos elsewhere. Most people want to stay on YouTube, they don’t want to click off the site. It’s tough getting people motivated to action….

YouTube has demonetized most of our gaming channels, they don’t call it that, but revenue is down 90% since the summer, for PUBG channels its 100%, mil sim.

We’ve looked at moving some of our gaming channels from YouTube to hosting them via Amazon Elemental and Kinesis to do more analytics on it ourselves than letting YouTube gain all of that data, so we could potentially monetize it, but with 3-5 million views a month the fees would be ridiculous, then we’d have to staff up to analyze the data, and sell advertisers individually. So we’ve stayed with YouTube and monetized in other ways, Loot Crate, MVMT watches, Harry’s with embedded sponsorship, and Patreon.

There’s just no real way to move from YouTube, that’s where the eyeballs are. They shift about $35k a month from video hosting fees, so we live in Google’s world and the $20billion they spent buying YouTube and developing it.

What YouTube isn’t telling you is that’s cracking down on all but about the top 1000 channels. YT is hitting a point of saturation with videos and advertisers aren’t coming anymore – this is a problem for its top creators. So, in order to keep the top creators happy, YT has to cull out a lot of smaller ad enabled channels to drive up the CPM and revenue for its top creators. A little over a year ago YT shook down its big stars and forced them into the YT Red program or threatened to cut them from the lucrative partner benefits they were afforded with the 3m+ subscribers they created. YT also used the same action to get its stars off of Vessel, which was gaining traction on YT. This was a death blow to Vessel.

Vimeo charges like $200/yr to host videos. As long as there are still gun channels on YT, there will still be people watching gun videos on YT. The model of making money from ad revenue is done. It’s time for gun channels to either run at a loss or have an alternative revenue stream, where the videos are free and drive the other revenue source.

Every gun channel out there should only post a video stub on YT that directs viewers to full 30 or vimeo.

.. and then publish a brief informational synopsis / VERY skeletal trailer for it at YouTube, with Click-Away links in both the Video itself, as well as in the Info Description area too.

Be sure to include the Reasons for the off-YT clickaway, … “Google / YouTube hates and censors gun (etc) content” , “Google / YouTube hates and censors conservative political speech”, “Click Here to Check Out New Fair Hosting Site X”. — Also if those are embedded in picture/vid form it would be difficult to algoban them.

This isn’t still the era of the great sleep. Viewers, particularly the massive shockingly Red younger viewers, would get on-board with the ClickAways to non-censoring hosts very quickly, making a nice growth spike for the hosts’ advert data.

Lefty drones would be told to complain ceaselessly and thereby provide a force-multiplier via the Streisand Effect. ‘How dare you seek a fair place without our boots on your neck? Everyone knows all the cool kids love their information filtered through a globalist’s arse. Reeeeee!’

(And content creators who haven’t gotten on-board yet can be influenced to, — rather than ‘pick a side’ yet — , very common-sensibly publish their videos at Multiple hosts for a larger total potential for eyeballs / influence / income. Then once they become comfortable with that they can begin to move away from YouTube, increasingly taking their subscribers with them.)

Goolag can’t “disagree” with what doesn’t (at Their site) quite actually exist.
They can’t censor, age-wall, reset, shadow ban, etc, a full video that they do not host.
They can’t censor / flag a video with no actual content or political positions.. nor be the executioner for whether any form of peaceful art or protest meets their subjective ‘merit’ ..

.. and when they Try to do that it will only stand further against them in about Year3 of President Trump’s 8 year run .. and his FCC / DOJ’s coming soon curb-stomps of lefty megacorps for using their money and power to selectively violate the First Amendment rights of particular millions of American Citizens.

Neither will they be be able to just go Buy competitors anymore, unless they’re Trying to trigger a Trumptrap Monopoly Breakup.

Meanwhile, as the Viewers become used to being at new hosts … have them favorite and bookmark Those links, so in the future they’re less and less going to YouTube At All for Any reason.

So, Demonetizing? Ok, now let’s have the Content Creators play that game Too — by increasingly providing NO CONTENT WHATSOEVER on YouTube. People can’t watch what isn’t there. Call it an Atlas Shrugged for social video. Except that everyone (But Google) is welcome at the new island.

Alternative hosts, once jump-started, would grow Very quickly, what with no de-listing, resetting, walled-gardening, mystery banning, etc, etc, moving-goalposts bullhockey going on from the new and honest sites’ owners.

At first YouTube would still get their advert monies, but as the viewers determined that the only things of interest at YouTube were the redirector postings, they’d might has well just load the alternative sites instead. This attrition of viewers would begin to affect Google’s money, more and more as it snowballed.

I never really cared about what comes out of Yeager’s mouth one way or the other. Simply put, letting a private company stamp down on free speech on a social media platform is morally no better than allowing a government to do so. The reality is that YouTube is a virtual monopoly. (Yes, I’m aware that they are not the only video site. However, just like Standard Oil, they control the overwhelming majority of the market space.) Add to that the domination of their parent company in overall network traffic routing and you have not just a monopoly, but also a trust.

Youtube is just making it less and less attractive to stand on THEIR soapbox.

There’s two issues here: 1: monetization. Youtube seems to have decided they can make more money by just cutting payment to content creators by 90-100%.

2: strikes. This is connected to monetization, since Adapocalypse caused them to start and continue to overreact. They use algorithms to help flag content, because doing it manually by policy would imply support of any controversial viewpoints presented on their platform. These algorithms are aggressive, because they do not want to lose advertisers to things like the PewDiePie incident.

I find it amusing that people who argue for net neutrality don’t have a problem with youtube arbitrarily censoring content, considering their virtual monopoly position.

The problem is that YouTube has also made sure that THEIR soap box is the only one available. By doing so, they have painted themselves into a corner. Their private property rights do not trump the free speech rights of hundreds of millions of people.

Well, to be fair, net neutrality and editorial control over your own property are different things. But lots of team(R)s are for killing net neutrality, where team(D) is for it, but philosophically, the arguments are reversed, the technical reality is tech gives lots of money to team(D), while telecom companies give lots of money to team(R) and modern politics have little to nothing to do with underlying 1st principles, other than money I suppose.

Well, since Net Neutrality has been killed it’s going to cost a thousand dollars a day to watch YouTube. Problem solved!
I feel bad about the trans people who are going to die as a result but omelettes, eggs…

Standard Oil is a poor example. The more they gobbled up small oil companies, the lower the consumer price of oil went. It was a win for consumers, not to mention they had nothing whatsoever to do with censorship. Try again.

The website I’m setting up at this time has the following editorial policy:

Post whatever you want. Unless you’re threatening other people, talking treason/sedition or openly admitting to or encouraging serious illegal behavior you can say whatever you want. The only person a rant about “da Joooos!” hurts is you because the only one who looks like a moron is the poster of that rant.

At that point I might opt to moderate the comment and/or turn it over to LE as the situation warrants. Other than that, feel free to post whatever dumb/ignorant/stupid/offensive stuff you like.

IMHO, the only reason James Yeager did what he did was because he knew that he was going to get flamed and as much as he acts like a hardass he doesn’t actually take criticism very well.

No, “da Joooos!” is a common internet insult directed towards people who go on wild anti-Semitic rants, especially conspiratorial ones like “Those damn Jew bankers secretly control the whole world and that’s why North Korea has nukes! Because the Jewminatti want it that way so that they can use their banks to finance another war in South America to eliminate the White Race! Oh, and Lizard people!” type shit.

The kind of thing that, generally speaking, has a few historical snippets of truth in it but otherwise is tinfoil-hat-wearing nonsense and then goes after Jews or Blacks or something that’s an object of the writer’s delusion/hatred/stupidity.

I also use it to go after people from the Left who talk about “Banksters” because 99% of the time when that word is used by a Leftist it’s a “dog whistle” for “Jews”.

The problem isn’t all “da Jooos” it’s the “Liberal/Progressive” Jews (the “majority” in that faith, I put it at 90%), they are OVER represented in the legal community and politics. Just take a gander at municipal/state/federal office holder’s staffs and you will see what I’m talking about, the staff and lobbyists (many “Liberal/Progressive” Jews aka “totalitarians”) set the agenda and are responsible for writing the legislation, the politicians are just the face of the office, morons, nothing but puppets of “the Left”.

and i doubt if any of those “jews” could trace their ancestry back to abraham. the real Jews can. mot of the “jews” actually trace their roots (if they are honest) back to a mongolian tribe that took on Judaism in about 400AD for political reasons and are also linked to the international banking families just for starters. the real Jews are lower class citizens in Israel and descend from the 2 tribes of Judah. the 10 tribes of Israel were dispersed before the time of christ and if you look carefully the symbols of their royal houses can be found in the royal emblems of the royal houses of europe. however those royal families are no longer of the same bloodlines as they originally were

Do you not believe in private property? Or do such a concept only apply to those that you agree with?

Do you not believe in the 1st Amendment? Or do such a concept only apply to those that you agree with?

YouTube is, theoretically, providing a service the public wants. It’s completely their choice about what content they allow to be shared, even if they have the most popular such service. It costs viewers nothing. Creators are not guaranteed anything.

Feel free to criticize them. They deserve it. Feel free to call them hypocrites. They are. The method to combat such things is to come up with a better solution, which is admittedly not easy. But talking about anyone “letting” YouTube do what they are entitled to suggests that you want the Government to have the authority to regulate their speech and their ability to regulate their private property.

Protecting freedom is a multi-faceted effort. It does not just mean re-enforcing the 2nd Amendment, it requires more… Including the 1st Amendment and private property rights. If we allow such rights to be eroded, it makes the job of protecting out 2A rights that much harder.

Yeah… Except that monopolies don’t have a “private property” defense. This has been black letter law for over a century. In any case, when private property rights and a compelling public interest clash, private property rights lose. Ever heard of eminent domain?

Freedom of speech is a much more compelling public interest than a slight infringement of YouTube’s (non-constitutionally protected) private property rights.

In the real world, you have to balance rights. My right to free speech is not limited to a bar on interference from the government.

Monopolies are not automatically illegal. So there’s no loss of a private property defense.

Yup… I’ve heard of eminent domain. I’ve also heard about it being totally abused. The Kelo case is a prime example. “Compelling public interest” now means “better economic use” and the ability to give one person’s private property to another person, which is not the original intent of eminent domain.

Private property rights are very much constitutionally protected though. There’s the 5th amendment for starters… And I bet you could make a case under other amendments, including the Due Process Clause.

Your right to free speech is a right of protection from the government. YouTube has the same right. Just because there is a clash should not mean the government gets to interfere. That should be the last thing we want, the slippery slope is crazy.

The PragerU lawsuit is interesting, and while their success will give me some happiness, it’ll also bring me fear of whether it also opens up Pandora’s Box. 1A protections already skirted by with a big win in Citizen’s United, but that’s still under constant attack, just like Heller.

The point is that when private property rights and compelling public interests such as the protection of free speech clash, private property rights lose. Unless you want to live in a feudal society, they have to. Oh, and the 5th amendment merely protects you from seizures, not mandated non-discrimination policy. Sorry kiddo, if you want me to respect your right to run your business as you see fit, you have to respect my right to free speech.

Yes, monopolies still have private property rights, and saying any different isn’t in any way reflected by US law.

A monopoly can be broken up, but split YouTube and Google, and then what? What you’re arguing for is nationalizing YouTube or Google. So fine, come up with the TRILLION dollars it would take, book value is $748billion today. Plus, add the $80billion a year in operating costs, what’s the likelihood of that?

Breaking a monopoly has zero to do with what your talking about, its not a public platform, its a platform that Google provides for the public for their profit, that’s why they spent so much money on it. This is capitalism.

I can have my private property rights and choose to not allow you to say something on my property. The problem is with your perception that your right of protection FROM THE GOVERNMENT gives you some rights-trump-card over MY RIGHTS. That’s not how things work. That’s not how we should want things to work. The reason we do not want things to work that way is because the way to enforce such a concept is through GOVERNMENT FORCE. We do not want to give the government more authority over our lives, that’s how our rights become mere formalities, able to be ignored by some ill-defined concept of “compelling public interest”.

Our republic was designed to be less susceptible to the problems of a tyranny of the majority, but that’s exactly something that can be easily justified via your totally undefinable and limitless “compelling public interest” concept.

The 5th amendment protects against more than direct seizure. But not going to get into that. I’ll just say it again… Private property rights are protected, via multiple means, by the Constitution. Which is a GOOD THING.

Lets not try and diminish all of our rights, which protect us from GOVERNMENT TYRANNY.

But “corporate tyranny” is fundamentally different that actual tyranny of government. The recourse is different. In point of fact, there is no such thing as “corporate tyranny”.

Is netgoogtwitbookzon creepy in their insinuation in your daily life, sure. But they literally perfected the thing that we call the internet today. Which is not what DARPA created, the fundamental thing that we call the internet today was created after DARPA released the foundation for the things that became TCP/IP and DNS to the public, private businesses built the infrastructure, TimBL at CERN defined HTTP, and everything else flowed from there. Its the apps man. YouTube built the app to host your content, Google bought them, its theirs, running on a shared network that many folks provide, but the government has little say over.

Corporate tyranny is just as bad as government tyranny. That’s why in a civilized society we balance individual right against compelling public interests and have for centuries.

You have to be very careful there. That is exactly what the gun control proponents say about the right to keep and bear arms, about “balancing it with the public interest…” blah blah blah I’m not saying that rights can’t be balanced, but that you have to be careful in making that argument about other things when so many gun controllers try to use it to justify gun control.

Hey, good luck getting any legislature or the Courts to accept that there is a compelling public interest in forcing YouTube to allow the gun fancy freedom of speech on their service. The Cubs winning a World Series and the courts doing that just isn’t going to happen in the same century.

YouTube is a publicly accessible business. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for a business to discriminate against various groups. Most certainly minorities are protected as are religious beliefs. What the courts will ultimately have to decide is if political speech is protected as well as race, color, religion, or sex by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

If I have a business that’s open to the public and I ask a Black person to leave my store because they’re Black, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 means I’ve just broken the law and I will likely beheld liable both in criminal and civil court.

If I am a Black person and I’m having dinner at your house and you stand up and say “ALL BLACK PEOPLE OUT OF MY HOUSE NOW”. I would have to leave and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have no bearing. That’s because a private home that isn’t open to the public as a business is truly private property.

So, there is a legal difference.

What the lawsuit filed by Prager University will ultimately decide is if it’s discrimination for a business to ban or censor someone for their political views.

So, then we can all agree the guy in CO, open to the public for business, had to make a cake for gay couple and Jewish couple, even if he felt it violated his Christian or Muslim beliefs (the Koran does not like gay either)? If they want to remain open to the public for business, under our constitutional government which provided them an environment to build their business, Google needs to make cake for blacks, whites, Muslim, Jews, gun owners, etc. and FCC appointment by Trump who tossed out net neutrality if a huge strike against free speech.

Maybe just anti-discrimination legislation making it illegal to discriminate based on political views? Seems like a much more limited response than nationalizing an entire industry. After all, I’d trust any government to run YouTube evenhandedly about as much as I trust Google to do so.

Given the quality of people they have hired to investigate Trump, I would say one leftist star chamber is pretty much the same as another. I suspect we will need some sort of legislation to establish a standard similar to “public accommodation” for any web business that uses user supplied content for the majority of their publication.

The 13th amendment didn’t violate anything, it clarified something, and changed the law. Its literally the constitution. And the 5th and 14th amendments fundamentally define the rights to “life, liberty and property”.

pwrserge actually slavery has not been banned in the constitution. in the original writing of it it did ban ALL types of slavery however now it only says “involuntary slavery”. this was changed in the 6 say war with britian where the brits were off the coast in their ships bombarding (correct me if i am wrong, i am an Aussie after all) Boston. what the change of wording means in effect is that the bankers and lawyers etc can take more charge (lawyers etc are registered to the bar association that still has links to old england like it or not hence the whole titles like esquire etc) and through that can get you into voluntary slavery through contract law. all cloak and dagger stuff that most don’t realize. contract law is designed to put a person into slavery without calling it such.

In terms of fighting back against this as an individual channel the problem is that YouTube is too big. They’ll simply ignore the owner of a channel or a dozen channels because there are a zillion channels and, quite frankly, most people don’t give a fuck.

The same thing is true of Twitter. Getting kicked off Twitter means you’ll probably never get a satisfactory explanation as to why. In fact, they’ll probably just ignore you until you go away. They’ve done it a bunch of times and they continue to do it.

Until these companies really fuck up and screw with something massively popular, like cat videos or something, they’re going to get away with it. Just accept that as a fact because it is.

I don’t much care what your argument against the company’s behavior is and I don’t much care if you’re 100% right with that argument. Your argument is going nowhere because the company is huge and no one cares about your argument.

Want to change this? Build a YouTube killer website and start cutting into YouTube’s revenue stream in a deep way. That will get their attention. Bitching won’t.

Little problem with that. Google’s anti-competitive practices make that virtually impossible. That’s why Google was scared so shitless of “net neutrality” going away. The removal of the FCC from the equation opens them up to massive amounts of anti-trust lawsuits.

Here’s the problem though… Youtube has become Kleenex. Think about it, do you ever say hand me facial tissue or Puffs facial tissue, HELL NO you say gimme a Kleenex and it doesn’t matter what brand is handed to you. It doesn’t matter what’s written on the box it’s still Kleenex. The same can be said for Qtip as well, no one says hand me a cotton swab unless they’re a doctor no most say get me a Qtip. You Tube has become that for internet videos nobody knows Full30, Vimeo, or Patreon but everybody and their grandma knows You Tube and Google. The only way to really beat them is to come up with something that’s exactly the same but different enough to avoid copyright suits and even then it’ll be viewed as a second rate knock off even if it’s really a better product.

Hey Commenters: Why didn’t you bother to check out any of the claims in this article, then say so ?
I found this in two seconds, on Americanmilitarynews.com:
“”Yeager and the videos he had previously created have been shrouded in controversy throughout the past several years. In 2013, Yeager posted a video claiming he would “kill people” if then-President Barack Obama used an executive order to ban semi-automatic weapons.
He later edited the video, getting rid of that portion of the video. Yeager made a second video saying he stood by his earlier comments.
The video prompted the Department of Homeland Security and the Tennessee Department of Safety to suspend Yeager’s handgun permit.”
I will not be checking back in, so it is what it is. I don’t care what anyone might have to say here.

If they want to curate user content, they don’t need “common carrier” protections given to those who don’t curate user content. Let the liberals whine about big government they created when it is used against them.

We don’t just have to worry about YouTube. Now that nothing is preventing ISPs from blocking sites, they could block Full30 as well. Since ISPs are essentially monopolies in many areas, there is nothing that could be done about it. You can’t use another ISP if you don’t have another ISP in your area. And there is no legal recourse. From a legal perspective, ISPs are free to do whatever they want—the government is free to block sites as well. The only thing we have is their “word” saying they wouldn’t do that.

The Founding Fathers created the Bill of Rights because they knew the government needed restraint, they couldn’t just go on their word to honor those rights. Now we are in a situation where there is no written law preventing the government or ISPs from blocking sites.

ISPs don’t have any incentive to do as you described. Oh, and now that Net Neutrality has been repealed, they are on the hook for anti-competitive practices, something net neutrality has previously shielded them from.

Good lord, that’s exactly the reason what ISP’s want net neutrality out, of course they want the freedom to censor, its exactly in their interest. In most places in America the cable company is the internet company, and…cord cutting (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, etc). You are arguing for two things that are absolutely the opposite of what you think they are, and therefore completely nonsensical.

Pwr. Net Neutrality has zero to do with this. Its about common carriage and network segregation and discrimination for ISPs. Whether its allowing, or not, them to discriminate on specific websites and services. Whether its bittorrent, Netflix, Youtube, etc. The YouTube argument you are talking about is editorial content control within YouTube.

The main difference between pro NN and anti is whether ISPs are Title 2 or not. The ISP itself is not allowed to restrict content within certain sites, or at least its not practically possible today, but the actual content is binary, they’ll either block or throttle YouTube, but they won’t control what YouTube hosts, YouTube isn’t an ISP. Maybe in the future an ISP will be able to censor within content, but I think your argument would be against this too, as it would allow Spectrum to bounce TTAG in whole or in part.

I don’t have a fundamental problem with the goals of net neutrality, just the way it was implemented. It was not the least restrictive method of achieving a compelling government interest. (Not even the most effective.)

There actually is written law severely restricting the government from blocking sites. At a minimum, there’s the 1st Amendment. The Net Neutrality debate does not change what sites the government can order be blocked.

Probably because the rifle goes *pop*pop*pop*pop*pop* at 7:56 and 16:21 and 20:11, and at least once you can’t see his finger, so they assumed it was fully automatic or using a bump stock of some sort. That, and the backwards hat guy didn’t wear eye protection. Gotta practice safety!! (thus the condom video). LOL! 😉

Yes it’s a private company, but discrimination laws still supersede the fact that they are denying a service to one group of people due to a political belief or simply a specific (often educational) legal interest.

Imagine if youtube decided to permanently ban videos from women, gays, minorities, etc. or what about all the videos on youtube talking about cannabis and paraphernalia?

Point being, is, as was stated, the “guidelines” are nebulous at best and until they can clearly outline why they are clamping down on certain *legal* subjects and ignoring other *illegal* ones, I smell one hell of a big class-action discrimination lawsuit.

The 1A protects more than speech. It also protects association. It also protects your right of free speech from government intrusion. Expanding it to private persons results in cases where an artistic cake maker is able to be fined for not wanting to make a wedding cake celebrating a same-sex marriage.

Expanding anti-discrimination laws is also a bad idea. We discriminate against people for all sorts of things, every day. Where does it end? If there’s no limit, the government is now a tyranny and your rights are meaningless just as soon as someone else says their right to free speech should overrule your right of association.

Except in no rational way can you say YouTube’s rights would be unreasonably infringed by forcing them to stop banning people because they disagree with their politics. Would you be ok with AT&T getting to cut your phone service? How about ComEd cutting your power? At a certain point, certain services are so vital to the function of our society that the rights of the service providers take a back seat. In this respect, Google is their own worst enemy.

Wow. That’s quite a statement. In that case, the government can now force TTAG to allow Bloomberg to post as many anit-2A posts as they want. That’s the power you’re actually saying the government should have. That’s definitely something I don’t consider reasonable.

YouTube is not a public utility. It is a luxury. It may be held in high esteem within some of our social constructs, but it is not a necessity and has zero public safety concerns. If YouTube disappeared tomorrow, society would still function perfectly well.

Only a technological illiterate would argue that YouTube is not the public square of the digital age. Again, by creating their de-facto monopoly, YouTube and Google have opened the door to being treated like a public utility. Sorry kiddo. You’re arguing that the minor infringement of the rights of a multi-billion dollar corporation outweighs the major infringement to my right to free speech and the same right for literally hundreds of millions of people. Doesn’t work that way.

Kiddo? Technologically illiterate? Your assumptions are as far off as your reasoning.

YouTube could be considered “A” public square from a digital perspective, and the PragerU lawsuit may allow that argument to win the day, but that is still not the same thing as a public utility. There’s no life & death safety concern. People’s lives, society, complaining, pretend lawyering… All would continue with or without YouTube. So the “compelling” part has less weight to me than to you, and luckily your free speech rights do not prevent me from saying so.

Nor is the public-square argument a slam-dunk. Is YouTube infringing on the ability of Vimeo or Patreon in any way? Are they forcing you to use their service?

Since when is infringing on anyone’s free speech minor? It doesn’t matter if its an individual or a giant corporation. Protecting the free-speech of any and all is important. Allowing any infringement is never a minor deal. Thinking that their just corporations is how certain liquor makers are restricted from providing TRUTHFUL info on the make-up of their product. It is how vapor smoking makers are not even allowed to quote FDA findings. It is how a non-profit had to defend its ability to make a video critical of Hillary Clinton all the way to the Supreme Court.

It’s disheartening how dismissive of others’ rights you are when they disagree with your own, regardless of how if such a dismissive attitude were to prevail, it could result in your own rights be diminished as a “compelling public interest”.

This is a long game being played. Losing sight of that and not understanding the ripples caused by bad public policy, those are great ways to lose everything.

What about pro-ISIS content? What about pro-NAMBLA content? What about anything that you personally find offensive but might not be for others? Bullying, rape, suicide… If the Goog doesn’t have the absolute right to censor on their platform, then what. You make a fallacious argument on one single thing you WANT to be true, but what you personally want on their platform means very little to Google.

There’s also a practical technical limitation that YouTube has, video is the most difficult content you apply an algorithm to. Its something that a human is really best suited for viewing.

300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, if you do the math on a 2080 hour work year, that’s 124,800 people, without any overhead, review, etc. So they just go with the technical solution. Plus, if they demonetize it, that’s more money for them if you have to go back and beg for allowing monetization, and strikes are just another extension of that.

That does not create freedom, that creates tyranny. Freedom created at the point of a gun (i.e. Government Power) is not Freedom. A short-term win for your point-of-view via the exercise of government power leaves the government with more power over your life, which in the long-term is not to your benefit. The more power the government has, the less actual freedom.

By protecting the rights of those you do not like, you protect your own rights.

Their “right” to trample on my rights? Really? Sorry kiddo. Freedom of speech does not just apply to the government. The very idea is absurd.

This. This is why I’m not a libertarian. Your “solution” would simply replace a government gun with a corporate gun.

Again, preventing people from infringing on the rights of others is not tyranny. You’re the sort of genius who would have defended the “right” of the Confederacy to practice slavery or the “right” of the south to enforce segregation.

no matter which way you look at it this is a very sticky issue. infringing on anothers rights of free expression is never good whether it is government, corporate or individual. it is also difficult when a conglomerate like google has a virtual monopoly on a form of expression such as youtube. google also has the ability to filter results in your web searches so that things they dont like are less likely to come to your attention. imagine if they decided to filter sporting goods stores as many particularly in the US also sell guns.
the only law that would stop them is to make it so they or the govt could only censor material on whether it was a federal criminal offence…. NAMBLA or some extreme porn (such as snuff) comes to mind here. as the right to keep and bear arms as a militia to defend against tyranny (which is govt incursion upon the people) is right there in the constitution then that makes it something that should be spoken about. ISIS videos is another issue again. it is terrorist activity against all americans (and indeed any nation that is not moslem controlled) and while on the one hand i feel it should be controlled at the same time i think it could well be used to good effect to find those enemies within.

And there’s your fundamental mistake, not that I think you’ll actually admit it (or understand at this point), but freedom of speech is a right protecting us from government action. It does not protect us from someone else exercising their own rights.

Rights are protections against government action. Every single point of the Constitution is defining interactions between the government and the governed. Mostly putting restrictions on what the government is allowed to do. The rights defined in the Constitution are not applicable to anything other than the government. Originally, the Bill of Rights was not even applicable to State governments until they were incorporated via an amendment.

There is no corporate tyranny here. There is a corporation choosing to exercise their own rights. They are not forcing you to use their service.

Me, kicking you out of my house, or having you charged with trespassing for not leaving after ignoring some of my silly house rules, would be me exercising my private property rights. It would not be trampling any of your rights. Just because you do not like how I exercise my rights, does not mean you get to override them, or have the government override them. Your rights have the same priority as my own.

You’re misunderstanding of these concepts is once again, causing your assumptions and reasoning to be quite off.

Again… Bullshit. What you’re supporting is you cutting the power lines to my house because you own the power company and you happen to not like my politics and don’t want me to exercise my freedom of speech. The fact that you’re not “forcing” me to use your power company is completely irrelevant. Just like YouTube, I have no practical alternative. It’s even more blatant when you take drastic anti-competitive actions to ensure that there WILL BE no practical alternative because you own not just the power company, but also all the down-chain infrastructure.

YouTube is a private business, and if it wants to favor one viewpoint over another that’s their right.

However, YouTube and ISP’s enjoy various legal “safe harbors,” such as that they’re not liable for republishing infringing materials as long as they follow the DMCA takedown routine. (Copyright infringement is usually a matter of strict liability.). The rationale for creating these “safe harbors” was to encourage and further the growth of the internet and associated public discourse.

My modest proposal: revise the DMCA to essentially make YouTube, Twitter, et al. choose one or the other. If they want the DMCA safe harbor, they can’t engage in viewpoint discrimination. If they want to assert their right to engage in viewpoint discrimination in their business, then they should not expect or get legal immunities that were intended to promote public discourse.

That doesn’t work because the DMCA is specifically about copyright and the treaty defining international intellectual property rights, actually two of them. A viewpoint isn’t a copyright, discrimination isn’t a copyright.

I get that everyone would like YouTube to allow more of the thing we like on it, and treat it like any other content, and pay our guys a fair share of the revenue, but that’s not our right, or their requirement. Plus its not just about 1 company, when you start talking about making blanket laws, its going to effect every company and would have aspects that would have far reaching implications to what it means to actually be a private business.

Many on this forum have stated that they are anti Net Neutrality, which fundamentally allows an ISP to discriminate against any content, user, or provider that uses its network, i.e. censor. So being for censoring for the ISP, but against for the app provider doesn’t make logical sense.

Not at all. Yes, the DMCA is copyright law, and what I am referring to are the immunities to what would otherwise be strict liability for copyright infringement that Congress decided to extend to ISP’s and similar providers . . . because they claimed that without such immunities, their ability to provide a public forum / robust internet would be chilled by the threat of liability.

What I’m proposing is that if they want those immunities, then they ought to be required to truly provide the public forum. YouTube et al. ought not to be able to be able to claim on one hand that they have the right to exercise viewpoint discrimination in their business, while at the same time enjoy legal immunities under the guise that such are necessary because they are functioning as a de facto common carrier. Pick one or the other, just not both.

I agree with private property rights. However, people often times confuse property that’s privately owned yet is open to the public for business as “private property”. Once the doors are open for business, you now play by a whole new set of federal laws.

YouTube is a business, not strictly private property like your home or dwelling. As such, pursuant to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, businesses can’t discriminate against people at their place of business. Since YouTube is a for profit business that is open to the public, it must abide by the laws governing discrimination. This means they can’t deny you service based on race, religion, color, sex, etc. If YouTube banned me for being black, they would be in violation of federal law.

Since this precedent is already set, PragerU and others can argue that YouTube is discriminating against gun owners. It’s no different than the bakery who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. They were compelled by the courts to make the cake even though it’s their “private property”.

YouTube can do what they want, it is their house, right up until they open the doors for business then they play by a whole new set of rules. What hasn’t been decided in the courts is if being a gun owner places you in a “protected class”.

We do have a 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, so perhaps some gun friendly judge will say we’re a protected class. We’ll know when the case is decided in court I suppose.

Now, in the case of your house, you can throw anyone out for any reason you want as long as you don’t conduct business from that house.

The flaw in your argument, as someone mentioned above, is that “gun owners” are not a “protected class” (as defined by the applicable federal statutes) that “has been historically subjected to invidious discrimination.” (Those of us living in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Hawaii and Massachusetts might argue otherwise, but until the statute changes, we are stuck.)

This is exactly the point, now there is a case in front of the SCOTUS that would tangentially address this, but this all gets into a sticky wicket of what discrimination looks like.

Gun owners are not a protected class, the 2A is a constitutional truth, as is the 1st amendment, so the exceptions must be definable and incredibly limited.

We can argue and disagree in the public square, but I can refuse service in my business for any reason that doesn’t inhibit a protected class in an “undue burden”. Google’s business, arguably, has made it very difficult to get a similar product for a similar price, i.e. free, but they are 100% right that that they’ve spent billions to make it easy for people to allow Google to host their content, but you’re free to go somewhere else, just not get their special sauce.

It sucks, but this whole YouTube phenomenon was what is described as a perverse result, i.e. unintended consequence.

An “unintended consequence” that basically eliminates the idea of free speech in a digital society. Yeah… That’s what we call a good reason for corrective government action.

The core argument is that the freedom of speech of hundreds of millions of people is far more important than a minor inconvenience to the political ambitions of a corporation.

What you’re proposing is basically allowing a handful of companies to decide what is and is not an acceptable topic for public discourse. That is the antithesis of a free society. At the end of the day, moral absolutism and an empty sack is worth the sack.

His solution is simple. Use government to enforce the will of the majority (i.e. a compelling public interest) at the expense of just one company’s rights, but have no logical limiting factor on why or how the government would not or could not use that same power on someone that he actually approves of even though it could be described as a non-definable “compelling public interest”.

Simple, make content based censorship illegal. Demonitization? Sure, ok, I can accept that. Nobody is entitled to your money or your advertising business. Flat out banhammring people… not so much so long as their content is not illegal.

Hey Tim, to reply to your reply comment to TruthTellers about posting on Vimeo and Full30. I run a pro 2nd Amendment Fakebook page for Lawrence County IN. I post links to your videos and a few others and I PREFER to post links to Full30. I refuse to send anyone to Y/Tube if I can help it. The only exception is those who haven’t made the jump to Full30 yet.

This is why allowing the foundational Internet registry(ies) to be handled by UN-sponsored NGOs was a horrible, awful, very bad, not very good thing.

They’re YouTube on steroids, a mystery set of central scrutinizers positioned to silently disappear what they don’t like from the interweb as a whole. To get around them, you can’t just go to a different generally known location. They’ve got the maps — nobody can find your location. They think the same: it’s their world we’re just annoyances in it. They’re largely the same people, talking meaningfully to each other about How Things Should Be at Davos, or TED for the lightweights. You get invited there, right? Look at their resumes. They bounce among the same sets of institutions.

Of course, client-side, peer to peer indexing and directory technology bypasses this, is ultimately un-squelchable, and actually already exists in the infamous “dark web” in various forms. In a world where bitTorrent exists, TOR exists, and … others, this genie is way out of the bottle.

Using stuff like that will also drive anybody a little bit different into the arms of the sketchy and hard-core criminal. It’s like that’s what they want to have happen…

Not inviting us to Davos doesn’t keep us far enough away, apparently. They still know we’re out there. Lurking.

To be completely consistent and curmudgeonly*, I have zero sympathy for people who are “banned” from YouTube, or Faceplant, or InstantGranny, or SnapCrackleandPop, or wherever. These utilities/outlets/channels/whatevers are within their constitutional rights to control content as they see fit. Wanna have freedom to post whatever you want related to guns? Start your own hosting service; control it as you see fit. No one owes us a forum for our ideas, hobbies, interests, viewership.

*Once belonged to a neighborhood gestapo. The homeowners were upset that a developer sold serious acreage to commercial developers, meaning the entire neighborhood would begin to look dodgy. The HOA took their complaints to city council, which gave them about twenty seconds of hearing. Everyone went home mad. At the very next HOA meeting, I announced that if the homeowners were serious about controlling the development of the neighborhood, the HOA should buy the land in question, and all the open land for about ten miles around. The unanimous response was that I was an idiot (long settled fact), and it was unfair that people had to own all the land in order to control it; that’s what government is for – protect homeowner property values.

Standard Oil became a bigger monopoly after government broke it up. Rockefeller was the largest stockholder in each of the “new” companies created by the break-up of SO. Rockefeller became far richer that he would have otherwise.

Monopoly is a financial concept, not a political one. Government holds a monopoly on declaring which entities are to be designated “monopoly”. And BTW the major telecom companies are not monopolies because there are dozens of smaller ISPs who were granted free use of the major telecom infrastructure so as to serve smaller markets the majors didn’t want to serve, and as the only available internet service providers in those smaller markets (monopoly?).

No, they were found to be a facto monopoly. That was the justice department suing to break it up and a court had a finding of fact that they are a monopoly. And if the bar is set at 98%, YouTube doesn’t hit it. In the current political climate your high if you think corporate dominance would every be construed as a monopoly, and it wouldn’t be applicable for the reason your thinking.

And the recourse to a monopoly is to break it up, not to nationalize it. You know, exactly like happened to Standard Oil. The remedies you propose for the reasons you propose, do not apply.

But is exactly like what happened in Venezuela with the oil companies, or the USSR with everything.

Straw man HO! Nobody is talking about nationalizing anything. Forcing YouTube to not infringe on the freedom of speech of their customer base when their entire business model is based on being a conduit for speech is not an unreasonable restriction on their property rights. Why? Because the damage to YouTube cannot be demonstrated while the damage to their customer base is immense.

Good lord man. You are defining the problem as YouTube is censoring X content. You are then saying its because they are a monopoly. So those are two problems, not one, and the recourse for monopoly is to break them up, the recourse to making it an actual public platform is to make it an actual public property then they can’t censor anything (that still isn’t true, the 1st amendment isn’t absolute in the public square), and the only way to make that happen, buy them.

Yeah… Because valuing the rights of millions over the rights of one makes me a “leftist”… Fuck off. I offered a very simple solution that actually meets strict scrutiny standards.

Is there a compelling government interest in insuring free and open discussion of any legal topic on the internet? Yes.
Would preventing content based discrimination be the minimally invasive method of achieving such goals? (As opposed to breaking up a company or nationalizing it which are the options YOU offer.) Yes.

See, strict scrutiny passed. Your bullshit argument that anybody who is not a batshit insane ancap is a “leftist” is absurd. It’s a No True Scotsman at its most blatant.

No, no, a million times no.
“Is there a compelling government interest in insuring free and open discussion of any legal topic on the internet? Yes.
Would preventing content based discrimination be the minimally invasive method of achieving such goals? (As opposed to breaking up a company or nationalizing it which are the options YOU offer.) Yes.”

Did you learn the term Straw Man today? Because I don’t think that means what you think it means.

Your first point is immaterial, Its not the business of the government to interfere with legal speech, OR THE CENSORING OF IT BY PRIVATE PARTIES. You second point is immaterial.

Even if the government is ENFORCING speech with a velvet hammer, its still a hammer. Citizens United says corporations have the same speech rights as people, which also gives them the same private speech rights as people, as long as they are not violating the civil rights of a protected class, its the right of the private company.

You keep asserting rights of the government over a private company because of your FEELZ. That is not how America works.

So you’re saying that the government has no compelling interest in the free flow of ideas and information essential to a well functioning democracy? Ok… So I guess you’d have no problem with a corporate “Ministry of Truth” that’s subcontracted by… say… the DNC or even the RNC to ensure that the overwhelming majority of available information only contains “good facts”. After all, the government is not involved, just the political parties and their donors.

There is no “compelling” government interest in forcing private ownership to operate as if it were a government service. Government is mandated to not interfere with free flow of ideas. Government has not constitutional authority to interfere with private editorial decisions. The power of the press belongs to whoever owns one.

So you don’t really support the existence of a well informed electorate and are instead in favor of an oligarchy controlling the entirety of the flow of information which would make any democratic process largely ceremonial? Ok. Guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree then.

A public utility is paid for via taxes, not subscriptions. The idea that because something becomes pervasive it must somehow permit free/unhibited access for the pleasure of users strikes at the heart of private property and private enterprise. The same theory means a Cadillac car dealer must offer for sale every other brand of automobile, simply because the Cadillac dealer is the most popular brand in the locality, and other buyers should be accommodated because the financial power of the Cadillac dealer makes the dealer a de facto public utility. OR…

Go into a McDonald’s and declare they must let you buy Wendy’s offerings because McDonald’s is so pervasive in your area that there are zero Wendy’s available, but you have some sort of right to demand McDonald’s provide what you want just because McDonald’s is the fast food giant in your market.

You, sir, HAVE ABSOLUTELY ZERO right to speak in my house, on my telephone, via my computer connection. Same applies to my business office. Your constitutional rights are protected from damage by government, not other people. You have a right to argue for anything you want, anywhere, except ground that I own.

What a crock. Every business has the absolute right to not offer products of their competitors. That is not “discrimination”. The logical end of your thinking is that every product available to the public must be made available by every entity described as a business. The law only prohibits discrimination in refusing service to the public. There is no historical, judicial or mentally competent theory that choosing to provide one product, but not another is “discrimination”.

To be fair (by the way, that’s always a Letterkenny reference), you can’t discriminate against a protected class in your business, i.e. black, jewish, etc. But you can deny anyone the right to use your electric, or phone, in some states your required to have a publicly accessible bathroom.

Except that we’re not talking about products here. We’re talking about a power company deciding to cut your service because they don’t like your politics. At the end of the day, when no meaningful alternative exists (and you can’t seriously tell me that there is a meaningful alternative to YouTube), you’re basically deciding that a corporation gets to decide which particular freedoms you do or do not enjoy. Geniuses like you would have exactly no problems with wages being paid in company money only good for company housing and goods at the company store.

A power company IS a public utility (whether it should be or not is another question). A communications company not using publicly provided (taxpayer provided) communications channels (airwaves that are controlled by government, i.e. utility) is by definition not a utility. You may want it to be because you like the idea of appropriating what is not yours, but until government takes over (and you will really like that; review the history of the 1934 act that squelched FM radio for a decade so that the AM providers could limit competition), private property remains privately controlled.

But I note there has been no hew and cry for Facebook to be treated as a monopoly, nor Twitter. Is that because there are one or two tiny competitors keeping FB and Twitsville from being monopolies?

Your argument that private internet content providers must provide unlimited access to whatever you want is the same as requiring all businesses to provide every service available, everywhere. As in, no business has a moral right to limit which services are offered to the public. Forcing every business to provide direct access to competing products/businesses.

No… that’s a non-sequitur and you know it. Protecting free speech is a compelling government interest in a democracy. To argue otherwise is insane. Without the free exchange of arguments and ideas a democratic process is meaningless. By your logic, ISPs should be able to ban TTAG and all other counter-arguments to the gun grabbers so long as Bloomberg wrote them a big enough check.

Government does not protect free speech. Government is prohibited from interfering in the exercise of free speech.

If I am the only newspaper in town, government cannot compel me to print every opinion piece offered for publication, cannot compel me to have a comments section, cannot compel me to accept advertising I determine is pornographic, to compel me to allow a weekly newspaper to use my staff and print operations, cannot compel me to charge the same prices for all paid advertisements (smaller space advertisements pay less than large space advertisements, if you want more content, you pay more).

You simply want the benefit of someone else’s ideas, resources, efforts, risk-taking without paying for it.

Yes, his argument is the same reasoning as pro Net Neutrality, against government interference into internet infrastructure, but for government intervention on internet content.

The actual argument for government regulation for ISPs is because the public gave many of them actual local market monopolies, and subsidized them to the tune of hundreds of billions over the years. The argument for government intervention of Google is, that he doesn’t like how they treat the our gun content.

The necessity for the free flow of ideas far outweighs your “‘muh property” argument. Without the free exchange of ideas we don’t have a democracy. We have an oligarchy. Fun fact bro, once said oligarchy exists your “property rights” won’t mean shit.

YouTube doesn’t limit the free flow of ideas. It only limits your desire to take control of that which isn’t yours. There are multiple other means of communication that do not depend on YouTube (of FB, or whatever). Those means may not be to your liking, but they exist, and ideas flow. There is more information transfer now without YouTube than was ever possible ten years ago. If YouTube and Google and all the other evil internet content providers shut down tomorrow, they would be hardly missed as regards free flow of information. However, it is the “free” part that is at the bottom of your arguments. You simply do not want to pay for using private property.

I’m done with you Sam… Feel free to lick the boots of Truth Inc. so that they don’t take your property. If you don’t see the problem with a few corporations having 100% editorial control over 99.99% of public discussion, you’re either retarded or selling something.

Although Youtube its a private company, there’s a potential for a restraint of trade lawsuit if the posters haven’t violated Youtube’s terms of service and are being punished, or if they can show unequal treatment. At the very least, discovery would make the Star Chamber critetia public. Youtube isn’t a public bulletin board at the grocery store. They have revenue sharing agreements in place with the commercial channels, and they are required to live up to their obligations. For users and channels that aren’t trying to get paid, Youtube can tell them to pound sand for no reason without repercussion.

If YouTube is violating their own terms of service, the case to be made is not creation of a public utility, but pursuit of legal action. However, if buried in the terms of service is the right of the content provider to terminate anyone, anytime, for any reason, that is no different from any other commercial service offering with the same provision (or maybe more akin to “at will” employment).

Your idea rests on the public utility model, which is always government controlled. When the government regulates, freedom flees. Do you honestly believe all the explosive innovation delivered by unregulated internet companies would have resulted from government control of any of it?

As I said, you have no civil, human, natural right to come onto my property and demand I provide you anything. I may allow you limited access under limited conditions to my property, but you may not demand full access, nor may you demand I provide you passage through the underground tunnel between my house and the neighbor behind me simply because you find it inconvenient to spend the resources to walk around the block (cost).

The problem with your moral absolutism is that in this particular case, your solution would cause a far worse problem than anything mine even remotely approaches. Again… Immagine “Truth inc.” and tell me about how something like that would not destroy a functional democracy.

Considering government’s hostility to free speech and “gun rights” do you truly believe government intervention/regulation/control will lead to more freedom? It is not in the government’s best interest to ensure free speech. It is not in the government’s best interest to protect gun ownership by the citizenry. It is not in the government’s best interest to endorse, prosper, protect, promulgate anything that reduces dependence on government largess. It is not in the government’s interest to reduce government control.

Government is prohibited from dictating content on private means of communication. The only legal way government can dictate content of communications is to declare the means of communications to be subject to the public trust (government), and that comes via legislation regulating the communications vehicle. The effect is to operate the means of communications as if it were a government function, i.e. a public utility.

Banding together an creating a competing video service like Liveleak or similar to Youtube that has no censorship as a matter of policy would be the way to go. It would take away a significant number of “eyeballs” from Youtube (which is owned by Google). Other than that you have to place your bets on any lawsuit against the Youtube monopoly (which an anti-trust lawsuit would probably be another interesting avenue).

Which will go splendidly when Google completely eliminates your content from your search result using their monopoly on the search engine business. When was the last time you saw LiveLeak or anybody else who competes with YouTube in Google’s search results?

IMHO, they’re a monopoly, and should either honor free speech or be broken up. They have an agenda against conservatives, and are attempting to shape public opinion by nature of their popularity and reach.

Actually the number of gun related content is teeny tiny, PewDiePie has more views in a month than all the gun videos of all time, 30-40 million a month. Wiz Kalifa has a single video with 3billion views, don’t know who or what that is, but there you go.

That’s true. That’s why I like someone else’s argument to put it on pornhubs network. Call it gunhub, that’s about the only thing that is the kind of scale as YouTube. You wouldn’t get paid, but you probably wouldn’t get banned either.

I find it funny that while the bigger channels get dinged over and over again for what seems like nothing, there are channels out there that have questionable or dangerous content that is gun related that is staying up no matter what they put out. An example is Annette Firearms Channel who has been called out before by even the editors here for being dangerous. He put out a video recently telling all gun owners it’s their duty to rush into a situation or mass shooting or they’re cowards. If anyone should be getting flagged or warnings, it’s Brandon Annette at Annette Firearms Channel and others like him who put out bad and dangerous advice that could get others hurt, killed or in jail.

They are a private company. They can host every video they want. The only thing they are not allowed to do is fraud.
And lying to customers, refusing to send out hard earned paychecks and violationg their own guidelines is exactly that.

Could you sue for violation of of the partner agreement? Probably not, the terms are vague enough to shield YouTube. Plus, since people, MAC included, have successfully appealed a strike, YouTube can show there is a good faith effort to correct errors, just as there is a good faith effort to let either algorithmic or complaint based flags trigger different responses.

I have to deal with this all the time, software and provider TOS’s are specifically written to protect them, not you, and based on US law, more specifically California law, a private company is perfectly free to manage their content, when you post to YouTube, and TTAG too, you are granting them a perpetual license for the content.

And practically, any billion dollar company can bury individuals in court, and Google is a 3/4 Trillion dollar company. So you’d have to fight them in court, there’d be a 99% chance you’d lose at every level based on US law, so you’d have to have an actual justified appeal, not just because you lost. Then you’d need to end up in the SCOTUS, where you’d lose too, and even if you won, you’d have spent years and millions of dollars to get there.

Google is at a minimum, allowing critics of content to mark videos for community violations till it trips the banhammer, or letting the robots “mark” content and just not caring about the impact (I have gaming channels, and we get the same things, PUBG gets flagged all the time), or are actively against 2A content. Frankly its abstractly true, but not technically a practical thing based on the volume of content YouTube receives, 300 hours a minute.

It’s a giant pain, we’ve counted on the ad revenue for the past few years, plus not having to pay to post, to create business based on their platform, but that’s the risk of betting your business on someone else’s good will, look at Microsoft and antivirus software, was a big business, now its basically a scam, since that’s the only way to make money.

You miss the point completely. YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, which trades publicly as Alphabet. I never said anything about a class action lawsuit. The idea behind litigation is for them to get you off your back. When that’s achieved, it doesn’t matter whether you win or not. YouTube has a multifarious degree of content in violation of thier terms that goes unchecked daily, a majority of it is accessible to minors. If allowable gun channel content is clearly being targeted by certain individuals or “bots” with pre-programmed anti-gun algorithms, yet an innumerable amount of inappropriate content on YouTube goes unchecked, this means harassment/discrimination is occurring. It (YouTube) being a “private” entity makes it worse. Private subsidiary of a publicly traded owner (Alphabet) or not, disparity, in the form it is being practiced, is wrong. Beyond that, individuals who falsely complain can be held liable for what they falsely complain about in writing.

Stop complaining about what private companies do with their leftist sites and support the sites that supports you. Sites like Full30.com, Thevlogs.com and Pewtube.com can only grow if we support them. Stop bitching and help.

Play the violins for MAC…oh what a world! He cant get free advertising for his own shop and businesses and get paid at the same time for that free advertising.

Its a privately owned company. They can do what they feel like. If you don’t like it change your content to another provider. Their company, their rules. This is not rocket science and complaining about it makes you sound like a f*cking whiner.

That is after all what a free market is all about.

Do your customers dictate to you what you stock in your store? Do they dictate to you the huge profits you make by way over pricing your products? No, of course not.

They also don’t make you manufacture a video on youtube bashing a fellow competitors rifles(AK type), through a third party. It is obvious you are trying to take market share away that, that manufacturer holds by trashing them and this supposed impartial third party kindly directs viewers to a similarly price AK with NO track record that costs the same as rifle being bashed with a proven track record.

Don’t let your ego get too out of control you already have a business empire. One of the seven deadly sins is GREED.

PS after this uneeded whiney snowflake post I think Im going to contact the the manufacturer to the video i was mentioning and see what they think about it….maybe you’ll hear from them. lol

Youtube is forum open to the public and everyone employed by Youtube including but not limited to the CEO and other high level executives are conspiring to deprive people of their rights. It is a felony under federal law for 2 or more individuals to conspire to deprive people of their rights. 18 U.S. Code § 241 – Conspiracy against rights. The maximum sentence typically is 10 years except in certain circumstances that likely would not apply. The executives of youtube committing multiple felonies per day against multiple people by conspiring against rights likely results in youtube more like a criminal enterprise than a legitimate business. Operating as a criminal enterprise may make youtube vulnerable to a RICO civil lawsuit which as far as I know anyone can file and can result in triple damages. Also if youtube does this to a minority and/or disabled individual posting gun videos then it could result youtube being investigated in much the same way as Walmart would be for discrimination.

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;
The above is the portion of the law that the executives are likely violating with impunity by punising those that excercise their 2nd amendment rights by depriving them of their 1st amendment rights. Both Youtube and Walmart are business of public accommodation and unlike walmart Youtube is essentially a 1st amendment forum and as such violating someone’s 1st amendment rights as retaliation for exercising their 2nd amendment rights is oppression in my opinion.
If Youtube was a private club they could censor anything they wanted with impunity but as an entity open to the public they cannot legally oppress the rights of the public for exercising those same rights.

Given there is no legal “right” to post or read content (you pay for newspapers and magazines), there is no violation of “rights”. To claim that you have a universal and cosmic right to whatever you think is important or attractive is to dismiss all rights of others. That justification means private property is extinguished the moment a non-owner finds it convenient to take the property.

YouTube has a “right” to establish business practices it will allow or not allow. Because YouTube is “huge” does not make it a public, free, utility.

Interesting you find it permissible for your ISP to charge for your connection to the internet.

It’s time to contact Youtube advertisers, Youtube programs and their hosts. They must be reminded that unless they are proactive in preserving the 2nd amendment, gun rights, and disapprove of Youtube’s liberal anti-constitutional agenda, pro gun viewers and subscribers will be forced to discontinue further support of individual specific Youtubes and lines of product. Millions of ‘Youtuber’s’ are affected by this, monetarily, educationally, and constitutionally. It’s not a matter of the convenience Youtube may have provided any longer. This entity, the liberal machine, extrapolates and infers unknown growth potential using popular vehicles without resistance. IMHO, Youtube was designed to come to fruition, working in concert, to engage it’s liberal socialist agenda, at the desired time when liberal media, entertainment and politicians orchestrated specific issues to a crescendo, in this case, gun law issues. Just saying, I hope I’m wrong. Peace.